Chapter 1: Liturgy, Mission, and World in Relationality
1.1 The Paschal Mystery: Christ’s Love for Others
1.1.1 Lumen Gentium: The Call to Holiness
One of the most “pervasive and particularly important”25 themes of the call to Christian discipleship in the Second Vatican Council’s document, Lumen gentium (LG),26 is the call to holiness. Holiness is approached first from the work of the Triune God, as God is the sole agent and cause of sanctification within the lives of human persons. The Holy Spirit, LG notes, is the one who, as bearer of divine love, and as the immanent activity (power) of God amongst human persons, effects the sanctity of the church as a whole and the individual Christian in particular. This sanctifying power effects holiness within the church and in the depths of disciples. Whilst it is the work of this divine Spirit to guide, strengthen, empower the church as a whole, and the individual lay faithful in particular,27 the Spirit, moreover, actively unites these individual members into the communal ecclesia, and deepens the bond of love between God and God’s church. Specifically for LG, the Spirit effects, or “urges”, three interconnected characteristics of holiness within human persons: charity, humility, and self- sacrifice.28
Charity, or love, as LG sometimes refers to it, ushers forth from God who is love itself.
Through the action of the Spirit, love becomes tangible through various activities of the church: through the liturgy, through prayer, through helping the poor, and through furthering peace.29 In other words, if love is from God, a God envisaged as Divine Love, this love is directed outward in two ways. First, it is directed from the church back to God through liturgy
25 John O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 310.
26 Hereafter, LG
27 LG, 4, 39.
28 LG, 5, 39. Feminist critiques of humility and self-sacrifice will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3.
29 LG, 38.
and prayer. The church glorifies God and thanks God for the gifts of love and holiness.
Secondly, it is directed outwards to others through justice, namely helping the poor and furthering peace. Therefore, love is not simply a gift for the church (or the individual) to receive, but is also a quality or a virtue which has socio-economic and political implications:
love ushers in unity, that is, a peace which overcomes war, hatred and all that fragments human persons from one another.30 This notion of love is framed Christologically.
How does one enact love, particularly a divine love, according to LG? In LG, divine love is understood through the revelation of God through the person of Christ Jesus. He is both the “Teacher and the model of holiness.”31 His life, death, and resurrection, that is, the Paschal Mystery, were inexorably connected to holiness. His actions of healing, preaching, and table fellowship showed God’s love bringing unity out of discord, that is, life from death (sin). It was because of his love for humans living with the effects of sin, death, and oppression that Christ came to lead human persons to greater holiness. Holiness, therefore, is Paschal in shape. That is, Christ Jesus as a teacher and model of holiness, in LG, is one in which love brings life out of sinful conditions, and human life should be shaped according to the Paschal Mystery in order to better reflect Christologically who Christ Jesus is.
If the Spirit empowers humans to enact love of God and love of one another, then the epistemological notion of love to be incarnated is, what we might call mimesis (imitation) of Christ. Though LG does not use this term, LG does use “testimonium et exemplum”32 to indicate the role of Christ for disciples. In Chapter 3 this concept (mimesis) will be discussed further, but for now it helps to understand how disciples look to Christ as an example, an example being something one imitates or copies. As we will see shortly, this Christological mimesis is extended by Popes John Paul II and Francis, giving a fuller and more vigorous Christological interpretation of holiness. Yet within the Vatican II documents, this theme of Divine Love is given initial theological grounding for the mission of the Church. Mimesis of Christ, however, is not enough; simply mimicking Christ’s activity from scripture overemphasises human activity apart from God’s initiative in empowering human persons to act in accord with divine justice. In other words, there needs to be a simultaneous participation of human persons within Divine Love (i.e., grace or the Holy Spirit) in order for the fruits of that love to be empowered through human activity of loving God in return as well as loving other human persons. In this way, imitation is directed toward Christ’s living out of God’s mission rather than an imitation which either distorts Christ’s mission or worse, is against God’s purposes.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 40.
32 Ibid.; Translated as “witness and example”. Latin edition of LG, Vatican website, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-
ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_lt.html, Accessed 27 July 2017. Later on, Gaudium et spes (Sec.
22) employs imitation, thus imitation is not foreign to the documents of Vatican II.
Through the ecclesial activities of prayer (which includes liturgy) and justice, LG suggests, the Church not only imitates Christ, but participates in God’s own holiness in an imperfect way. This sense of holiness is rooted in the image of the People of God – a church imperfectly journeying through history, seeking in the power of God’s Spirit to overcome sin and evil in order to grow in charity and justice, that is, holiness.33 LG is cautious about overinflating the “external activity” of holiness, i.e., justice, which would lead potentially to an overemphasis on imitation and an underemphasis on God’s gift of love as that power which effects the church’s activities of holiness. Therefore, LG is suggesting that holiness is both an interior quality, as well as enacting love externally, i.e., living out of divine love. Or, as T.
Howland Sanks rightly states, “Following Christ [has] some consequences”, 34 and one of those consequences is to express outwardly the inner participation in Divine Love. In other words, Christological imitation flows from participation in Divine Love. Accordingly, LG cautions envisaging love as simply activities: holiness is “not [gifted] so much in the multiplying of external acts, but rather in the greater intensity of our love….”35 Thus, holiness is loving one’s self, others, and God more deeply as well as more robustly, as well as through activities of liturgy, prayer, and justice directed to God as the very source of Divine Love gifted to human persons. Thus, imitation is rooted in participation. How, then, is love explicitly ecclesiological?
The image of the church as the people of God, in LG, is linked inexorably to another ecclesial image, the church as sacrament.36 The church is both a visible expression of God’s holiness as it tries to manifest through God’s Spirit the purposes of God’s love, but yet, at the same time, the church is in solidarity with sinful humanity. The church itself, as well as society as a whole, LG notes, is in need of greater solidarity with God and between human persons.37 God’s love helps the church to overcome sin in order to grow in, as well as to be instruments of, God’s love towards the world. The church images and mediates the love of God as it lives out of this love within its daily living. Particularly as a sacrament, LG insists, the church is the visible image of the Divine Love, which all human persons are called to imitate and to participate in. In other words, for LG, the human situation of existing with the results of sin is itself directed towards Divine Love as the fundamentally divine calling of all humanity to holiness. The call of the church in general and of disciples in particular, LG thus proffers, is to the holiness of Divine Love that is witnessed to and enacted in the life of Christ
33 Ibid., 48.
34 T Howland Sanks, “The Social Mission of the Church: Its Changing Context,” in The Gift of the Church, ed. Peter Phan (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 2000), 271.
35 LG, 51.
36 Ibid., 1, 9, and 48.
37 Ibid., 1.
Jesus himself. The mission of the church and disciples is to grow in Divine Love (love of God) and to live out of this Divine Love in the world.